Tip: Clearing old messages to gain some app memory

Now let me start off by saying I am not a “Memory Watcher”, but I do see everyone posting here at BBOS saying “I booted with 50mb” or “my memory is holding steady at 45mb”. My philosophy is, if the phone is running smooth…who gives a crap if the app memory is high? Anyways, that’s a discussion for a different thread J.

I am always seeing people post their boot-up memory and it got me wondering, why is mine booting up in the low 30’s? I don’t run that many apps. Usually only have one theme installed at a time. So what gives?

So last night it hit me. I’ve had this phone for over 6 months now. Maybe something is “building up” in my phone. So I decided to look in the message folders to see what I had. And behold, there was a lot of junk. I have 3 email addresses that I come to my Storm. I had never really realized it, but I had it set to keep messages for 4 months! So I dug a little deeper. My sms outbox had thousands of sent messages from months past. Needless to say, I didn’t really have a need to keep all of them. So I went through and cleared out all my folders, backed up my info, wiped the device & re-installed BBCv7. Guess what….I booted with 45mb. Now I’m not saying that if you clear your folders that you will double your app memory. All I’m trying to suggest is that it might be a good idea to erase some of that old data. This phone has been out for a while and stuff adds up.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to clear your message folders

While in your messages, click the BB button and select “View Folder”You will see this screen:

Now select a folder and you will see all the entries stored in that folder. You could go through and decide which ones you want to delete and do it manually or if you want to blast them all away, just click on the bar with the date on it and choose “Delete Prior”. This will delete all entries that are before the date you clicked on. You could also move down to a lower date bar if you want to keep some of the newer entries.Now all you have to do is repeat this in all the folders.

I pretty much cleared everything out. Anything that I have to keep is stored on my laptop anyways.

MAKE SURE YOU WANT TO CLEAR THE MESSAGES, Backup before you do this.

For some of you this will not apply to. But if you are like me and get tons of emails and texts, then it might benefit you. I also recommend checking your settings to see how long your device is keeping your messages. I changed mine to 30 days.

To change this go into messages and bit the BB button>Options>General Options and look for the setting “Keep Messages”.